Within business the term “Lead Management” typically refers to the methodologies, systems, and practices employed by a business to generate new potential business and business clientele, and is generally operated through a variety of marketing campaigns or programs. Lead management as commonly thought of facilitates the connection between outgoing consumer-customer advertising and the responses to that advertising. As such different processes may be employed business-to-business and direct-to-consumer activities. Lead management is considered therefore a precursor to sales management (SM) and customer relationship management (CRM). As such within the prior art this has been viewed as the connectivity that facilitates business profitability through the acquisition of new customers, selling to existing customers, and creating a market brand.
As such within the prior art the general principles of lead management create an ordered structure for managing volumes of business inquiries, frequently termed leads. The processes are therefore established to create an architecture for the organization of data, distributed across the various stages of a sales process, and across a distributed sales force. With the advent of the Internet and other information systems technologies, this process has rapidly become technology-centric, as businesses practicing lead management techniques have shifted to automated systems. However, a reliance on automation can significantly minimize the personal interactions with lead inquiries that are vital to success within a significant proportion of enterprises, especially at the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) levels. The European Community defines MSMEs as being enterprises with up to 10, 50 and 250 employees respectively.
Accordingly, today lead management systems, whilst apparently simple in scope, have evolved to model and simulate complex process flows as clients, prospective clients, and enterprise personnel, typically sales professionals, interact. These prior art approaches are complex as each interaction and subsequent action creates a variety of potential outcomes, both productive and counter-productive to business development. This ever-increasing number of scenarios creates functional disconnects, in other words, critical opportunities to mishandle an inquiry that reduces or destroys its potential value. Appropriate management of these scenarios is the function of lead management within the prior art.
However, for MSMEs, lead management is typically not part of an overall set of business solutions including SM, CRM, etc. although even at their initial stages MSMEs know such tools and methodologies are available. Rather MSMEs experience issues relating to cost, manpower, IT infrastructure, etc. and hence such tool sets are typically in their future plans. However, at the same time MSMEs today are marketing and engaging their customers and potential customers on more parallel channels than ever as today as leads etc. may arise from traditional telephony, although may be fixed and mobile which may trigger different response approaches, and in-person but also via electronic mail (email), form completion upon web site(s), website tracking software, and social media which may itself represent posts to social media, social media content, etc. as well as text. This increased range of options also comes at a time where both network capabilities and portable electronic device capabilities have led to expectations, within younger demographics particularly, of immediate responsiveness.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide MSMEs with a discrete user configurable software solution allowing them to receive customer input from a disparate array of sources and based upon tags and content within the customer input route the input to one or more MSME personnel.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.